Nancy Prins is a winner in the FOIA lawsuit sweepstakes and all she gets is a lousy $500.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer gets to fund years of legal costs on behalf of the Michigan State Police, which withheld a dashboard videotape from her that showed absolutely nothing.

This is what the state police think of you, the public: In May 2008, Prins, of Ionia County, was stopped by state police trooper James Yeager, a respected lawman and Air Force veteran. Yeager cited Prins’s passenger, Jack Elliott, for failure to wear a seat belt. The stop took place near an intersection just north of Interstate 96 outside Ionia.

In July, Prins filed an open records request with the state police that included a copy of the videotape taken during the May traffic stop. These are standard materials that are produced as evidence in many contested traffic stops, only this time, the state police refused the request, claiming it had nothing.

“Any in car video that may have existed is no longer available,” the police told Prins in a letter. “Only kept 30 days [and] reused.”

I applaud their brevity, at the least.

Because in October 2008, when Prins’s passenger Elliott appeared at a hearing to contest his ticket, the prosecutor produced the tape Prins had been told didn’t exist.

The state police contend that the omission was a procedural mistake, simply a matter of someone not checking with someone else.

“This was a mistake made by an employee, not an intent to hide something,” says state police Capt. Greg Zarotney.

Prins sued the Michigan State Police, seeking damages related to the agency’s failure to comply with the law. Prins also named David Fedewa, the assistant FOIA coordinator who told her the tape didn’t exist.

The state police agency had no defense. So it filed a response based on a technicality: It claimed that Prins filed her complaint after the legal 180-day window for such protests.

The state could have simply called the whole thing off, admitted it had made a mistake and saved some money. But it didn’t.

“If there is a legal procedural error with the case, the attorney general’s office will attempt to get the case dismissed,” Zarotney said.

So on it went, and a lower court ruled for the cops, but Prins, spending her own money while the state spent yours, kept pushing.

In February 2012, Prins won her case. The state police lawyer before the appellate court that granted Prins her victory, admitted defeat, saying the case was now “really the matter of damages.”

Prins’s lawyer, Bruce Lincoln, said the whole thing was over a video that was useless.

“If the police would have complied there would be no law suit at all,” Lincoln said. “That tape didn’t show anything. Why did they hide the darn thing when it didn’t show anything?”

Further, the $65 seat belt violation was dropped, making the FOIA case “the most expensive seat belt ticket the police ever issued, “ Lincoln said, and estimated that the state spent at least $100,000 in legal fees fighting Prins.

As for Fedewa, the state police’s assistant FOIA coordinator, the court dropped him from the defendant list. But he’s the guy who in 2004 allegedly withheld a number of complaints in a FOIA response to a request for info on rest area busts.

The $500 Prins received for her trouble was awarded as per statute created in 1976. In dollar terms, adjusted for inflation, it would be $128. If you ask for public information and a court finds that a public body has “arbitrarily and capriciously” violated the Freedom of Information Act, as the state police did in the Prins case, the court must award the $500 to the aggrieved party.

It’s a small price to pay for such a grand act of deception.

“That’s not punitive to anybody,” Lincoln contends. “The way the law is set up, a public body can hide something, and it only costs them $500 to hide it. I’d increase it to really mean something, so that these public bodies can’t just hide something they don’t feel like handing over. ”

It was the second time in four months Shirkey filed such an action, and neither of the measures got any traction.

There’s little appetite for transparency reform in Lansing, but measures like Shirkey’s are gutsy moves to help people like Nancy Prins and to punish entities like the Michigan State Police, who so ironically disregard the law, which is disputed by Zarotney.

“We comply freely and openly with the FOIA law as it is written,” he says.

Steve Miller is an award-winning national investigative reporter and editor/author of six books. His work uncovering corruption in a quasi-government insurance agency in Texas won a digital investigative award in the 2011 Best in Business journalism award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. His book, "Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock 'n Roll in America's Loudest City," is available in stores. You can email him at penvengeance@gmail.com.